Burger King employee says story of him quitting, stealing chicken nuggets was a hoax

Share Update:

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

MIAMI — A man who went viral Tuesday after he claimed to have quit from Burger King now says his story wasn’t true.

According to BuzzFeed, John Correa is coming clean after his tweet claiming he’d stolen all of his restaurant’s chicken nuggets gained widespread Internet attention. Correa sent out a tweet, which was later deleted, that read, “TODAY WAS MY LAST DAY WORKING AT BURGER KING SO I TOOK ALL OF THEIR NUGGETS, F*** IT.” His post included a picture of what appeared to be a bag of frozen nuggets in the passenger seat of a car.

Screen grab from Correa’s tweet, which was later deleted.

Correa now says he was simply running an errand for his manager at the time, and that he concocted the story to see how many people would believe it.

“You see something on media, you automatically believe it was true,” he told BuzzFeed. “And you automatically follow whatever it says.”

He added that he believes media consumers will fall for any story. ““I just want people to wake up and realize what’s going on in our society right now,” he told BuzzFeed.

Correa says only two media outlets contacted him to verify the story: BuzzFeed and WPLG in Florida.

Other than those two, “Nobody contacted me to see if it was true or not,” he said.

According to BuzzFeed, his tweet had 40,000 retweets before he deleted his entire Twitter thread. His post had attracted comments claiming he was “The Chicken King” and that he was a “hero.”

The fake story was featured on several local news outlets in Florida and nationwide, including WGN-TV, and on prominent websites such as Mashable.

Correa told BuzzFeed that he still works at Burger King, but hopes to leave in a few weeks as he has another job lined up.